Secrets of Success

Cooking Secrets

Do you have a kitchen or cooking secret that saves time, calories or clean up?

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Please note these are member-submitted secrets and are not reviewed by SparkPeople's health experts for accuracy. If you feel a secret is inappropriate, please click the "Report Inappropriate Secret" on the secret's page and our staff will review it.

Double your dinner and save some in your freezer for later. It saves time and stress on those busy school nights. Running to soccer or baseball? Not a problem you have dinner waiting in the freezer. My family's freezer fav? Chicken Pot Pie!

Instead of using just raw fruit in a fruit salad, try adding some rhubarb stewed with a sweetener and its' juice, apple stewed with a teaspoonful of mincemeat, or a piece of stem ginger in syrup chopped finely with some lime juice as the base then add some fresh and canned fruit in juice. This gives a few more options for ringing the changes and if you want some topping use yogurt, low fat custard or low fat home made rice pud made with a sweetener. They are all good served cold for breakfast.

Need to bring water to a boil before adding an ingredient? You probably know that covering your pot with a lid causes water to boil faster. I go one step further: My tea kettle is fully enclosed. I add the water to the tea kettle and put it on the stove.

Often a recipe will call for using only part of a can of broth. When that happens, rather than throw away the rest of the broth I add it to the cooking water for my next boiled or braised dish. This works especially well for starches, like rice, potatoes or pasta.

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